Caltrans

In a class catalog, it probably would be listed as "College Promotion 101. " That's what it looks like along U.S. 101 in the western San Fernando Valley, where a proliferation of large directional signs point the way to local colleges and vocational schools. In all, school operators have managed to get 36 of the green signs placed along a seven-mile stretch of the Ventura Freeway in Tarzana and Woodland Hills. It's the largest cluster of college directional signs in the Los Angeles area.

The Inland Empire's version of "Carmageddon" begins Friday night when Caltrans shuts down sections of northbound Interstate 215 in San Bernardino as part of an ongoing $723-million freeway-widening project. The "Big Shift," as transportation officials are calling it, is necessary to reconfigure traffic lanes during construction. The closure begins at 11 p.m. Friday and is scheduled to end at 6 a.m. Monday. It will occur in stages between 2nd Street and Highland Avenue. The southbound lanes will be open.

Pressure is mounting on the California Department of Transportation to sell 460 homes it acquired decades ago in Pasadena, South Pasadena and El Sereno to make way for an extension of the 710 Freeway that has been stalled ever since. But officials say it could be years before any decision is made on the properties. Caltrans bought the homes in the 1950s, '60s and '70s to accommodate plans to extend the northern end of the Long Beach Freeway from Alhambra, where it ends now, to the Foothill Freeway in Pasadena.

Even in a region where gridlock is a daily fact of life, what happened Sunday on the 10 Freeway west of Palm Springs has morphed from traffic jam to full-fledged scandal. A routine California Department of Transportation road repair project gone awry backed up traffic for about 25 miles Sunday, forcing drivers to endure delays of five hours or more and sparking a furious political backlash that has put Caltrans on the defensive. On Thursday, Caltrans offered its most detailed account yet of what went wrong, saying that a series of errors ranging from a delay in getting concrete shipments to removing too much worn pavement contributed to what they admit was a "horrible situation.

Good news for road trippers heading to Highway 1: No need to detour off the Central Coast roadway -- at least not for now. The small section of California's Highway 1 that had been blocked by a rock slide for a week and a half was reopened to two-way traffic along a single lane on midday Tuesday, a Caltrans announcement says. The area at mile marker 22 just south of the town of Lucia forced travelers heading north from Cambria or south from Big Sur to detour around the slide area.

In a standoff with federal forest officials, Caltrans is proposing to abandon a popular, cliff-hanging highway in the San Gabriel Mountains because it is too expensive to maintain. The proposal to walk away from California Highway 39, enjoyed by an estimated 3 million people a year, comes as the state struggles to close a $9.2-billion budget shortfall. To avoid closure, the California Department of Transportation is trying to persuade the U.S. Forest Service or Los Angeles County to take over the roadway, which runs 27 miles from the city of Azusa nearly to the crest of the San Gabriels.

A week after a double tanker truck exploded and irreparably damaged the Paramount Boulevard bridge over the 60 Freeway in Montebello, Caltrans technicians set out to test soil samples needed before planners can design a replacement. Crews knocked down the overpass after the truck, filled with 8,800 gallons of gasoline, caught fire Dec. 14 and came to a halt directly under the bridge, which straddles one of the busiest vehicle corridors in the nation. A 10-mile stretch of the freeway was shut down in both directions for about two days, forcing commuters to find other ways to get in and out of downtown L.A. "It's a huge commuting corridor, and everyone agrees it needs to be reconstructed as quickly as possible," said U.S. Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Lakewood)

The Eastside's version of "Carmageddon" came to an end Saturday when Caltrans reopened the 60 Freeway in both directions. The freeway, which normally carries about 225,000 cars a day, had been closed since Wednesday after a tanker truck carrying 8,800 gallons of gasoline caught fire. It exploded in a fireball under the Paramount Boulevard overpass in Montebello. The ferocious flames took hours to extinguish. No one was hurt in the fire, but the closure of a key traffic artery clogged highways and surface streets for miles around and made for nightmarish commutes.

With patience, frustration and a lot of help from their GPS devices, L.A. commuters faced down a true "carmageddon" as a spectacular tanker truck explosion kept a key freeway closed and turned the already tough Christmastime traffic into an endurance contest. Commutes between eastern suburbs and Los Angeles that once took half an hour doubled and tripled as other freeways and surface streets clogged for miles. When the 60 Freeway - which normally carries about 225,000 cars daily - closed Wednesday afternoon, it took Patty Ortega three hours to get home to North Whittier after she made the fateful choice to take Beverly Boulevard and Olympic Boulevard.

As Caltrans officials call for criminal charges against a former technician accused of falsifying bridge testing data, a top state senator is pressing for a broader investigation of the transportation agency itself. "Failure to conduct reliable inspection tests on the foundations of bridges, freeway ramps, retaining walls, and other structures may erode the public's confidence in Caltrans' management of the state highway and bridge program," State Sen. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord)